Several months ago (ugh, time flies) I posted a screencast demo'ing a semantic HTML editor. Back then I used a combination of client-side and server-side components, which I have to admit led to quite a number of unnecessary server round-trips.

In the meantime, others have shown that powerful client-side editors can be implemented on top of HTML5, and so I've now rewritten the whole thing and turned it into a pure JavaScript tool as well. It now supports inline WYSIWYG editing and HTML5 Microdata annotations.

The code is still at beta stage, but today I put up an early demo website which I'll use as a sandbox. The editor is called Swipe (like the dance move, but it's an acronym, too). What makes Swipe special is its ability to detect the caret coordinates even when the cursor is inside a text node, which is usually not possible with W3C range objects. This little difference enables several new possibilities, like precise in-place annotations or "linked-data-as-you-type" functionality for user-friendly entity suggestions. More to come soon...

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Thanks, Chris :)
No plans re editor resizing, but it should be doable if needed. May need some additional positioning code in that case (to detect the correct y-value in a scrollable page with a scrollable editing field).

I peeked at the javascript source and noticed there was no license noted and paggr is not open source. Is swipe going to be open sourced and if one wants to play around with it what is the recommended way?

Comment by S. Sriram on 2010-12-25 21:52:38 UTC

Right now, Swipe is part of paggr and there is no open-source version. If there is enough interest and a way to fund the process, I'm happy to open-source it, though.